Datacoup – Unlock the Value of Your Personal Data

You could investigate the people in charge of the company and their backers. If you think they have more to gain by draining a small number of peoples bank accounts than they have to lose by committing a federal fraud crime then don't use them. Obviously any evaluation would also depend on the credibility of the information presented on the website about those individuals.

I don't make any purchases with my debit card, so I would only link my credit card, which has pretty solid fraud protection. I'd probably be more way about cash accounts.

"It asked for my ... online banking password."

My bank tries to drill it into me that I should NEVER, EVER give my password to any third party, including employees of the bank. This behaviour from Datacoup certainly seems like a big red flag to me.

They do say this, though:

"Datacoup neither sees nor stores any bank or credit card user login information such as username or password. The communication to the bank is hashed and the access point is tokenized, which means we cannot decipher a password even if we wanted to. Datacoup never sees nor stores account or routing numbers."

(http://datacoup.com/docs#security)

Did they redirect you first to a secure web page from the bank, and is it this page which asked for the credentials? If what they say above is true, then (I think) this is the only way in which this should happen.

This is exactly the same reason I do not use mint.

Not to mention that their name is DataCOUP. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

If you've ever used a service like Mint then you've already given similar access to these accounts.

I doubt if Datacoup would drain your accounts. More like a bad actor breaking into Datacoup's DB would drain your accounts.

Asking for your banking credentials does not worry me. I would need to look more closely at this particular one, or even contact their customer support to see if they have in-house security (the cyber kind) and what certifications they have, dates and nature of audits etc. I worked for a company like this as a software engineer and know the lengths they go to ensure there is minimal data on their servers that could be stolen. And yes, this could mean your data is sent to a third party. Sometimes it's more cost efficient and secure to use a third party scraper which hands back a token for access and pays for all the security stuffs to keep your data safe.

What DOES concern me as that the whole purpose of this service is to correlate data about you that is otherwise behind locked doors and explicitly keeping identity information intact. The services profit from your data and it's sale would far far out way any individuals.

CC info is no doubt a daunting ask but it is valuable information when it comes to monetizing data about us.

This space of personal data monetization is a huge trust exercise. The relationship has be developed with the user, almost at an individual level, for them to share their data from across platforms. Many of us are more willing to part, based on the knowledge that it's already happening and we should take part if we want something in return. While others are more hesitant and need to see the value (or other's adopting) before jumping in. And there are many others who it doesn't speak to at all - this includes folks who go out of their way to never post a photo of them online. To each their own :)

The path is evolving though, where users will have more control and gain an increasing amount of value from their data. But it's a longer term game - because the trust needed to get to the intimate information about users takes time to develop but is priceless once it's there.

Disclaimer: I am the co-founder of Powr of You (www.powrofyou.com), startup in the same space.

> On the business side, when interviewing VPs Marketing/Sales, the #1 question asked was "What additional value does this bring beyond what we already have?".

It's true that massive amounts of data are being collected, but the better value proposition for customers to sign up is: "Billions of dollars are spent by companies on advertising; you deserve a slice of that."

>The other issue is that the amount of cash required to make this interesting for the avg. person is relatively high.

I also ran into the exact same dichotomy when sussing out this idea, namely that people don't mind monetization of their data exhaust/patterns "for free" or in nominal exchange for a foreground service, but being asked to give this in direct exchange for monetary compensation makes them demand a very high premium for the exact same data.

EDIT: Personal.com is establishing a track record of securely consolidating and storing sensitive information. I can't help but think that controlled sharing of personal information (extending beyond core password/address/credit card/banking details) will be their next big push.

We're launching the exact thing you describe which also includes an API later this week. We don't plan to be a data broker just to let you backup all your data from any source and provide you with an API to access that data. We're Muxy.io

"More than 70% of people would reveal their computer password in exchange for a bar of chocolate, a survey has found." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3639679.stm

So they tell you to "reclaim" your data by letting them sell your personal data? Datapimp seems an more apt name for them, implications included.

So they have no idea on the true ask price...?

I connected about 4 accounts and the rewards/week were $0.60.

Have not tried giving them access to my debit/credit cards, that would definitely raise the reward but now sure by how much.